Читать книгу The Taking of Carly Bradford - Ramona Richards - Страница 10

Light came back slowly. With it came the stark aromas of medicine and disinfectant, as well as someone’s cologne. Dee could hear padded footsteps, the whispery sounds of low voices and the rustle of clothes near her bed. Behind her head, a machine softly beeped.

Hospital. I’m in the hospital. Where are the—She squinted and cleared her throat, grasping out with her right hand, which felt oddly empty. “The sandals…”

A soft pressure covered her wrist and the soothing baritone of Tyler Madison’s voice attempted to comfort her. “Yes, we have the sandals. You gave them to me, remember? Dee. You need to rest. Just rest. Everything will be OK.”

Dee struggled against the grogginess in her mind. “The shoes. Carly’s shoes.”

“Yes. You told me about them. Sleep.”

The light faded a bit, as did the pain. The voices swirled around her in a fog, yet every moment in the woods remained as clear as luminous pearls on black velvet. Especially the moment she first saw the little girl’s sandals. Carly’s sandals.

The white leather had gleamed against the rich green grass of the stream bank like a beacon, like the sudden appearance of a cherished memory on a bad day. The shoes were simple, just a wooden sole with white straps across the top of the foot. But they had a sweetness to them, as all little girls’ shoes do, with the white leather straps etched with tiny stars. One shoe lay flat, while one rested on its side, but Dee Kelley knew they hadn’t been on the stream bank long, since no splashes of mud dotted the leather.

Dee, however, knew she looked anything but perky when she had paused by the edge of the path to catch her breath, clutching a tree branch to stay upright. Her dark brown hair stuck in matted clumps to her neck, and sweat rivulets carved crevasses in her makeup. “Keep going!” Her voice croaked from lack of air and water.

Determination, however, had not stopped the cramp in her left calf, so she’d hobbled off the path to a shady spot at the edge of a stream. The stream ran beneath a narrow, wooden footbridge and extended several miles through the woods. She stretched her leg, gulping air and massaging the muscle. As the pain eased, she plopped down on the stream bank. “I hate exercise.”

That’s when she had spotted the sandals, their pale shapes standing out against the dark earth and grass of the stream’s edge. “Someone must have gone wading.”

Dee stood and placed one foot on a rock in the middle of the stream. She bent to lift the shoes out of the grass by their straps. As she straightened, she hesitated, puzzled. There were no other signs on the ground that a child had been anywhere near here. No footprints, no squashed grass, no rocks appeared tipped or out of place. Dee lifted the shoes and peered at them. “So, did you walk upstream and just drop them, forgetting you had shoes in the first place?”

She smiled slightly, as a painful but beloved memory stabbed the back of her mind. Joshua had often done that, had constantly flipped off his shoes and gone without, forgetting where he’d left the dreadfully hot, confining things in the first place. Mickey had wanted to make Josh start paying for shoes out of his allowance, but Dee had resisted. It’s a kid thing. He’ll grow out of it.

Trying to soothe the issue between father and son, Dee had written a children’s book, The Day My Shoes Took a Walk Without Me, told from Joshua’s point of view.

Dee took a deep breath and pushed the memory away. Part of her ongoing plan for recovery meant allowing the memories in but not dwelling on them. After all, dwelling on the past had kept her locked in her parents’ house for almost three years.

“Keep moving,” Dee said aloud, as much about her exercise as her past. The sandals still dangling from her fingers, Dee struggled back up the bank to the path. Stretching again, she continued toward her goal at a fast walk, reluctant to break back into the jog that had caused the cramp in the first place.

Her goal was the Federal Café, in downtown Mercer. Those three years of seclusion had added some extra weight to her petite frame, and Dee had become determined to rid herself of it. So, every day she walked or jogged the path into Mercer for a sensible, low-calorie lunch at the café with her new friends. She then took the road that ran from Mercer through several neighborhoods and the wooded area back to the retreat.

Dee picked up her pace a bit, the sandals bumping against her leg with almost every swing of her arm. Her mind drifted to the way she looked in a size eight. In particular, an emerald green dress that Mickey had given her just a week before the accident….

Dee stopped and lifted the sandals again, peering at them. Something about a pair of children’s sandals tickled the back of her brain, and she let it drift there for a moment. There was something…in the news…sandals, wooden soles and straps with stars on them….

The wind sucked out of Dee as if she’d been punched, and her knees buckled. She sat down hard on the ground. Carly Bradford! These had to be Carly’s. A sudden panic flooded over her. “What do I do—?”

Tyler. She had to get to Tyler. He would know what to do. He was always at the café this time of day; they usually ate lunch together. She picked up her pace, then broke into a jog. She had to get to the—

“Drop the shoes!”

The voice, harsh and low, came from Dee’s right, and she stumbled, almost falling into a bush. She spun, listening, unsure if she’d really heard a voice or if her mind had turned the rustling of squirrels and birds into words.

“Drop the shoes!”

Dee had instead turned and fled.

Tyler leaned against the wall in the examining room, watching Dee breathe, every muscle tightening when she shifted restlessly on the bed. The bruise around her left eye had grown to the size of his palm, framing a network of scratches on Dee’s swollen, misshapen face. Tiny butterfly bandages held several of the cuts closed, including one across the bridge of her nose.

His mind reeled to think how close he had come to killing her. He’d almost panicked when she’d darted into the road, and precious minutes passed before he realized that, although his fender had grazed her, most of her injuries were from an attack in the woods.

He’d bundled her into the car and headed for Portsmouth at lightning speed. He had radioed the station to alert the hospital and sent Wayne Vouros, his sole detective and crime scene specialist, to the site of the attack. He’d also called Fletcher and Maggie MacAllister, owners of the writer’s retreat where Dee lived. Maggie was a close friend of Dee’s, and she now waited impatiently outside the E.R. while Fletcher had joined Wayne at the scene, promising to call as soon as they knew anything.

Tyler shifted his weight and checked his cell phone one more time, even though it had not vibrated since he’d arrived at the hospital. He replaced the phone, then took a deep breath to quiet his increasing anxiety, his need to do something.

Finally, he gave in to the gentle urgings of one of the nurses and sat in a hard plastic chair near the bed. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and clutched his hat in one hand. He examined the band closely, for no good reason. He just needed somewhere to look that wasn’t Dee—or the smears of Dee’s blood that still streaked his clothes.

How could he have been so blind? Tyler knew that deer leapt out on that stretch of road all the time, yet he’d trundled through, his mind so on Carly that he had become oblivious to everything else.

Lord, I could have killed Dee. Please let me be more alert and aware.

Not that he was normally unaware of Dee. In fact, he’d been increasingly aware of her since she’d arrived in Mercer, with her sharp wit and soft Southern accent. He looked forward to their lunchtime meetings at the café, her questions about Mercer’s residents and history, her thoughts about life in the South.

Tyler rotated his hat in his hands. He enjoyed the way she looked, too, despite the weight she said she wanted to lose. He didn’t get that, the weight loss thing, even though he could stand to lose a few pounds, as well. He liked Dee’s curves, the way her dark hair caressed her shoulders with the soft curls at the tips. She barely came up to his shoulder, so she was maybe five-two, but she seemed just right to him.

What is taking so long? He glanced at his still silent phone again. Never had he so badly wanted to be in two places at once, to see how she was doing here, but also at the scene of her attack. Maybe I should let Maggie take over here. Then he immediately dismissed the thought. Wayne and Fletcher were certainly capable of handling the gathering of any evidence, whereas Maggie had no training with crime victims. He needed to be here when Dee awoke, not Maggie.

He paused. Interesting friends, those two, the New Yorker who had adopted Mercer as her home and the Southerner who had seemed so lost a few months ago. Maggie had been tough on Dee at first; now they were friends. Maggie could be surprisingly hard on the writers at the retreat, even though she was younger than most, maybe thirty-one or so.

Hmm. How old was Dee? Tyler shifted in the hard chair, trying to find any kind of comfortable position, as he attempted to do the math of Dee’s life. He looked again at her face, so oddly relaxed now under the crisscrossing bandages. He knew she’d been married for about ten years, and that her son had been eight when he died three years ago. That would make her, what, early to mid-thirties? She still moved like a younger woman, though…

He stood, pulling his phone out again, as if the ring tone had stopped working for some reason. Still nothing. He glanced at the clock again. Stop getting distracted.

He paced slowly, quietly. There had been too many distractions lately. Focus on the case. What if Dee’s mumblings about the sandals were right? Were the sandals yet one more thing they had overlooked? He knew without a doubt they had searched that stream bank. With a child Carly’s age, the stream always got checked first.

Yet all previous cases of missing children in Mercer had been about runaways, all of whom had returned home quickly. In his ten years on the force, nothing like this had happened. A true kidnapping. And although he’d gained a lot of confidence and experience in the four years since he’d become chief, Mercer did not lend itself to giving him experience in major crimes. Robberies, assaults, an arson or two, the occasional domestic dispute—these were routine. But since the town had separated itself from the county and organized its own law enforcement department apart from the county sheriff’s team, the police had handled only one murder and no other major crime.

Tyler’s mouth twisted grimly, and he dropped back down in the chair. Of course, Mercer’s low crime rate gave him plenty of time to obsess about a missing little girl. The very idea of someone swiping a kid filled Tyler with a stomach-churning revulsion. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would be cruel to a child, and he knew most kids were found within a day or so—or not at all. Whether or not they were found depended a lot on the initial investigation.

The initial investigation. Tyler felt out of his league and terrified of making another misstep. He had made plenty in this case, even with the FBI and the state police helping and his best friend, former NYPD detective Fletcher MacAllister, looking over his shoulder. An Amber alert had not been issued due to the lack of evidence that Carly was in immediate danger; no proof existed that she’d been taken as opposed to running away. He had told Carly’s parents—and the media—too much about their investigation. The lack of evidence had panicked him into asking the wrong questions of the wrong people, leading to a lot of misinformation in the press, and the Bradfords were even more devastated by the publicity. Every day the case had grown colder as early spring rains washed away the last semblance of evidence. There were, in fact, no leads at all, and even now no evidence that she’d been kidnapped. Not even a clean indication of a crime scene.

Yet everyone in Mercer knew that the happy princess had not run away. Tyler ached to prove it. To find her.

He shifted in the chair. Stop whining. Focus on the facts. What few there are.

The Bradfords had no known enemies. Jack and Nancy Bradford were beloved members of the community with no apparent enemies. Even though Jack was a Portsmouth surgeon, he’d been out of medical school only a few years. He’d never been sued and only had one complaint against him registered with the American Medical Association—and the AMA had cleared him in that case. Nancy had given birth to Carly when she and Jack were still in college, barely making ends meet. They were a family made close by hardship, and they adored each other. Almost no one Tyler interviewed had a bad word to say about them.

Carly often played in the woods, but at no set time. The only conclusion anyone could draw was that it had been a random act, a moment of opportunity. A cruel stranger who had happened to see the lovely child skipping along after her dog and decided to…

“Tyler?” The voice came from behind him, and he turned. The young woman who stood there—tall, blond and exceptionally thin—could have been mistaken for a model, except for the white coat and the perpetually exhausted look of an E.R. physician. As police chief of a small town without a hospital, Tyler knew all the E.R. docs in Portsmouth and Manchester. “Hello, Anna,” he said quietly.

Her warm smile was genuine but looked as tired as her eyes. “Hi, Tyler. She one of your Mercer folks?”

“Yes. And a friend.”

Anna nodded. “Then you might want to keep an eye on her for a few days.” She slipped her hands into her jacket pockets and her doctor mode took over. “She took quite a blow across the face. She says it was from a tree branch, and I don’t doubt that. No sign of concussion, though, which is good news. As you can see, we’ve stitched up the cuts and given her something for the pain.”

“Pain.” Tyler took a deep breath. “Will she be coherent if I talked to her about what happened?”

Anna paused, focusing on his eyes, considering the question. After a moment, she glanced at Dee, then shook her head. “She has a lot of meds in her now, but she’s asleep, not unconscious. She should stir soon, but she’ll still be loopy. She didn’t make a whole lot of sense before the meds, but now, you may not be able to tell when it’s Dee talking and when it’s the drugs doing the speaking. She needs to rest for a day or so, but she’ll be okay and far more able to tell you her story tomorrow. The nurse is prepping the release paperwork, so they’ll bring her out in a few minutes. Mostly, she needs quiet.”

Tyler nodded. “Thanks. We appreciate your help.”

Anna paused, then put a hand on his forearm. “If she needs me, page me. I’ll meet you here.”

He wrapped his fingers briefly around hers, then she returned to her work.

When Tyler returned from the treatment area, Maggie stood immediately. “How is she?”

Tyler held up the two plastic bags the hospital had loaned him, one holding a pair of white sandals, the other the contents of Dee’s pockets. “Shook up. Her face is all scratched up, and her left eye is black and swollen shut. Her doctor thought she’d broken her nose, but it’s just badly bruised.”

She looked up at Tyler, then pointed at the bag with the sandals. “What are those?”

He motioned for her to sit, then dropped into a chair next to her. “She kept mumbling about these all the way here. I couldn’t even get her to let go of them. She kept repeating that she’d heard a voice in the woods, demanding that she drop the sandals. She ran, but the voice chased her.” He paused, watching her closely. “She says they’re Carly’s.”

Maggie fell back in the chair as if she’d been punched, and her voice became a tight, hushed whisper. “Carly’s? How could they be Carly’s?”

He shrugged. “She said she found them by the stream.”

Maggie straightened. “That’s impossible. We searched every inch of that stream bank, the entire run of it. The whole town did.”

“I know.”

She shook her head. “And we’ve had other false finds. They can’t be Carly’s.”

“I know.”

“It’s almost too weird to believe.” She paused. “If I didn’t know Dee, I’d think she was…” Her voice trailed off, and she seemed to sag a little.

“Hallucinating?” Tyler asked.

Reluctantly, Maggie nodded.

“Except she didn’t smack herself in the face.”

They fell silent a moment, then Maggie pointed at the other bag. “What’s in that one?”

“The stuff from her pockets.” He turned the bag so they both could see the contents: a cell phone, keys, a pack of mints and a Swiss Army knife. He frowned at them. “She carries a Swiss Army knife?”

“Everywhere she goes. I think it belonged to her husband. Dee isn’t crazy about carrying a purse.” Maggie looked down at the floor a second, then back up at him. Squaring her shoulders, she stood. “What if she’s right? What if these are Carly’s and someone did attack Dee? What then?”

Tyler rose as well, watching her face closely, trying to read her meaning. Was this about Dee? Or the fact that those woods bordered the retreat’s property? Fletcher had once told Tyler that Maggie seemed to adopt all the writers at the colony, taking them under her wing no matter what their age. Encouraging, sympathetic, and patient with the creative egos, Maggie became their sister, mother, or daughter, depending on their needs. He also knew that Dee held a special place in Maggie’s heart. Tyler saw that in her now, the light of deep compassion in her hazel eyes.

He took her hand in his. “Then we’ll protect her. We’ll get her story and investigate. We’ll call the FBI and ask for their help again. We’ll have to revisit a lot of what we’ve done on Carly’s case.”

Maggie breathed deeply, her voice barely above a whisper. “If they are…I mean…would this mean she could still be in the area? Does this mean that Carly is still alive?”